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Personal Information Management

Submitted by Durst on March 22, 2005 - 8:16pm

One of the things Blake said a few days ago really struck home with me. To paraphrase, we need to write more about what we do and how we do it (as information professionals) and less about our own personal "stuff." That is the spirit in which I write the following:

In our personal or professional lives, how do we organize the information with which we are innundated? I receive upwards of 100 emails per day that are actually relevant to either my position, a position I'd LIKE to have, or a side interest. I have subscriptions to magazines, trade journals, and professional continuing education information that bombard my desk on a weekly basis. What do I do with it all? (Yes, I DO know where my DELETE key is and it receives regular, frequent use.)

What about the endless number of "born digital" documents that I crank out? White papers, outlines, training materials, research papers, synthesized reports?

I'm a librarian AND a records manager. Organizing my own S&*% should be a cakewalk right? I'll just do it the ARMY way and follow their retention schedules and organize it like that. NOPE...not good enough. It has to MAKE SENSE to me and my very verbose brain.

At work, one our commandments was to put everything in the directory "my documents" and have subdirectories under that. Except that when your harddrive went kablooey you (and your precious information) were toast. My directories are labeled like a card catalog, but my taxonomy probably wouldn't work for everyone.